Alice Walter (b. 1989, UK) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and shamanic medium currently staying at NKF’s guest studio in Stockholm. She holds a BA in Fine Art, Film and Video from Central Saint Martins, UAL (2011), and an MFA from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford (2020). Her creative practice combines collage, analogue video, and performance-based writing, exploring themes of psycho-spiritual realities, invisibility, and generational loss.
Walter is in Stockholm to collaborate with artist Mandy El-Sayegh on the exhibition KISS CROSS KILL, which will be presented at Kummelholmen on 10 May—15 June 2025. Kummelholmen is hosting El-Sayegh’s first solo exhibition in Sweden and are hosting both artists during their production period.
Although based in different parts of the UK, the artists share an interest in performance, sound, and video, with El-Sayegh also working across painting, sculpture, and installation. The NKF residency offers the two artists valuable time and space to work together closely, develop new works, and explore their shared interests.
Throughout the residency, they will engage with the city of Stockholm—gathering materials, footage, and sound recordings that will inform and become part of the final exhibition. NKF’s flexible studio environment allows the artists to work across various media, including writing, painting, video and sound production, as well as rehearsing and developing performances. The site-specific nature of both practices makes this an ideal context for producing work deeply connected to place.
XXX
KISS CROSS KILL
Mandy El-Sayegh in collaboration with Alice Walter
Kummelholmen presents the first solo exhibition in Sweden by Mandy El-Sayegh. Based in
London, El-Sayegh’s practice is rooted in assemblage, and executed in a wide range of
media, including densely layered paintings, sculpture, and installation, as well as
performance, sound, and video. Her works investigate the formation and break-down of
systems of order, be they bodily, linguistic, or political.
For this exhibition, El-Sayegh has invited artist Alice Walter to collaborate in a presentation
which incorporates audio-visual works and a body of new, large-scale, paintings by El-
Sayegh, unfolding throughout Kummelholmen’s sprawling post-industrial space. In XXX KISS
CROSS KILL, both artists consider the power embedded in images, and in the technologies
which create and disseminate them, using the aesthetics of the breakdown of systems of
image-making, processes of collage, endless loops and altered sensory states.
El-Sayegh’s recent works – densely and complexly layered paintings – incorporate images of
violence which have been widely disseminated through digital media within her own adult
life. For El-Sayegh, these images speak to the simultaneous over-visibility and lack of
representation, or agency, of subjects in states of duress. Images are reproduced
interminably through both formal and informal media, and yet the subjects remain
powerless and often nameless. The endless reproduction of images of violence in our
contemporary moment has a deadening effect, while the quality of images subsequently
degrades, stories are lost, forgotten, or suppressed within dominant narratives.
Alongside their distressing content, the images chosen by El-Sayegh also possess qualities of
aesthetic beauty, with some resembling erotica, or even religious iconography. El-Sayegh is
drawn to this tension, and to the possibilities for rewriting the codes which govern how we
receive imagery – the potential for painterly abstraction to confer renewed dignity or allow
transcendence to subjects under duress. El-Sayegh embeds repeated silkscreened
renderings of the photographs into her densely layered canvases, which use physical
collaged fragments in combination with acrylic and oil paint, in compositions that
consciously evoke the gridded forms of modernist abstraction.
Among El-Sayegh’s paintings, Alice Walter’s video works can be seen projected onto
translucent fabric screens. These pieces, created by manipulating the recording process of
VHS cameras, share their collage-based methodology and layered compositions with El-
Sayegh’s paintings. Walter intervenes in the electromagnetic transfer between capture and
playback, intervening in the electronics of the camera, incorporating multiple light sources,
lenses, colour gels, internal TV text/science manuals, and her own body into dispersed visual
fields destabilise attention, shifting between focus and dissolution. Selecting VHS, a defunct
format, and intentionally further degrading the images produced, Walter shares in El-
Sayegh’s interest in the mutability of images as they are repeatedly reproduced and
distorted, forming a wider investigation between the two artists of breakdown—of material,
of the image, and of wider symbolic systems.